Hackworth, James

ORAL HISTORY OF JAMES HACKWORTH, SR.
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 17, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is June 17th, 2011, and I’m in the home of James M. Hackworth, Sr., on Dutch Valley Road. And I guess we’re in Clinton, aren’t we? Is this a Clinton address?
Mr. Hackworth: This is a Clinton mailing address, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Clinton mailing address, but it’s down out between Marlow and Clinton and the other side of Oak Ridge. So that’s where we are on Mr. Hackworth’s farm. So thanks for taking the time to talk with us. I appreciate it.
Mr. Hackworth: Glad to.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about – let’s just start at the beginning. Where were you born and where were you raised? And tell me about your family and where you went to school.
Mr. Hackworth: Okay. I was born near Clinton on what would have been the old two-lane road. It goes around the Courthouse. Lived there maybe roughly a year or so after I was born. My parents then built a house – this was 1933. It’s next door to this house – and obtained about fifty acres from my grandfather. It turned out that I was still small, very small, in a crib, but one of the things I can remember them saying that the hammering and beating and so on, I didn’t wake up. Well, I still sleep very soundly.
But education wise, I went to Clinton High. I attended UT later at night school in Oak Ridge at the Oak Ridge High School at that time. In later years I had the opportunity to do some – I guess it’s called ‘distance learning’ today – from Lewis & Clark University in Godfrey, Illinois. Plus, I served an apprenticeship at K-25 for a maintenance mechanic. It was a five-year apprenticeship at that time. Today it’s three.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s stop for a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: All right. So we were talking about – now, did you have any brothers and sisters?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, I had two brothers and a sister, and two of the brothers worked in Oak Ridge. One at K-25 and one at Y-12, one for about thirty-five years and the other forty. And he didn’t miss a day of work and never late. I was a black sheep, I guess. I missed two days.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you really? Out of how many years?
Mr. Hackworth: Out of forty.
Mr. McDaniel: Out of forty years you missed two days of work.
Mr. Hackworth: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: Had pneumonia, walking pneumonia.
Mr. McDaniel: So anyway, you grew up here. I mean, where we are, right in this area. This was your home, I guess.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. Grew up in this area. After graduation from high school, one of my brothers and I went to Detroit and worked in an automobile factory up there about three years, two years for myself, three for him. And then when I was back in Oak Ridge, one of my friends had said that they would be interviewing, and I put in an application. Six weeks later, they called me to come to work.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mr. Hackworth: 1951.
Mr. McDaniel: You said you were born in ’33?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, ’31.
Mr. McDaniel: ’31. Okay, ’31. So you were ten or so when the war broke out, weren’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: That’s correct.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were old enough to remember some of that, weren’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yes. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you all spend very much time in Oak Ridge during that time during the war?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I guess in some ways we maybe were forced in it. My dad had been a letter carrier in Clinton for several years, and he had to retire because of – he had a twenty-five-mile walking route, and after seventeen years, he didn’t walk too good anymore.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess not.
Mr. Hackworth: So he got a job in Oak Ridge as the – it was Roane-Anderson at the time. And then he went from the MPs over to Oak Ridge Police Department, and I’m saying in the ’40s. It hadn’t formally become a city, of course. But he worked there several years, and he had some opportunities to get some passes for us. And we would go down, and like everybody else, the cafeteria is – you’d stand in line for three blocks before you got in the cafeteria, and that was pretty interesting. Of course, as a kid, I wasn’t interested in it, but you also saw the smokers standing in line. Somewhere along the line, the particular store would get out the word, “We’ve got cigarettes,” and here they would come from everywhere.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, they would come from everywhere. I bet. My goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: But that was during the time, rationing time, as well. And I guess some of the things that were rationed then, people today would say, “How could that be?” I am saying things such as sugar or meats or shoes. You only got so much gas per month. You had an A or a B sticker, and you had little rationing books for every child for all of the family. And that was kind of interesting. I still got, I think, my old rationing book.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, so your dad, he worked for Roane-Anderson, I guess, for the MPs there, right?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, right.
Mr. McDaniel: You lived out here in the country. Did you have a farm?
Mr. Hackworth: He did.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I meant. Did he farm part-time too?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, he did.
Mr. McDaniel: Did he have a garden?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, he had gardens, raising beef, and he sold some of the beef to individuals at the time. And people were very happy to get beef because you could only get small amounts at the grocery store. So it was part of the war effort. Mr. McDaniel: I guess that was kind of leading me to out here on the farm during that time when the people in the city were having shortages of things, you all were fairly self-sufficient.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: You grew food that you ate, most of it, I would imagine.
Mr. Hackworth: Right, we did. We would slaughter beef and pork, and we never went without some beef or pork. We always had food of that type to eat, raised a big garden.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you all do the slaughtering yourselves?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. That was quite an experience.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet it was. Do you remember the first time you witnessed it?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, I do. Just kind of an interesting sideline. We had a fellow that had moved here from Texas, and he was working in Oak Ridge. He was in this area. And he wanted to buy beef. My dad – they came to an agreement on a price, and he came down to get the beef one day. And he said, “Turn it out.” My dad was still at work. “Just turn it out, and I’ll take care of it.” Well, he took care of it but it took him about an hour and a half because when he shot the beef, he didn’t come anywhere near a kill.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, goodness gracious.
Mr. Hackworth: And it’s kind of turned out like one of those Western shoot-them-up things, you know. It wound up he didn’t have a lot of beef left.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, that was kind of idiotic. But there was a lot of incidences occurred. People would raise some of the things and actually take them to work and maybe even cook on the job.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, some of them did. And they would sell this then, you see.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, of course.
Mr. Hackworth: So some of them got caught and eliminated their jobs. I remember my dad talking about some folks who were doing that.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But people were willing to pay as much as they could for some of that stuff because they couldn’t get it.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, that’s right. One of the other interesting things that you’ve probably heard a lot about before was the bus system.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: The Fox brothers: R. C., who is still living today, lived down at Midway and Oliver Springs, and Gene were brothers, part of the Fox family today in the automobile business. And they started a bus. Had a contract with – then I guess it was AEC. And they ran buses all over: Chattanooga, Crossville, Oneida, Sevierville, Gatlinburg, Jellico, Chattanooga, just everywhere. It’s unreal. But they would come by and pick them up, and regardless of weather, it didn’t make any difference. It wasn’t like school closing. You went to work every day.
Mr. McDaniel: I interviewed Lester Fox, and he talked about that quite a bit.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, Lester’s involved in that. He’s a younger guy, you know.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, he was young.
Mr. Hackworth: But they’re – Lester, well, they’re a cousin of mine. There’s some good folks there.
Mr. McDaniel: So after high school, you said you and your brother went to Detroit for a little while, and then you came back to Oak Ridge and interviewed out at K-25. Got a job out there, did you say, in ’51?
Mr. Hackworth: 1951.
Mr. McDaniel: By then, K-25 was going pretty strong, wasn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, K-25 and K-27. K-29 had just been completed. K-31 was probably halfway completed.
Mr. McDaniel: What was your first job out there?
Mr. Hackworth: First job was what they called a Maintenance Mechanic Helper T. “T” was a trainee. So that was the five-year deal I was telling you about, before you got – you spent that amount of time, and progressively you would increase in your wages as you progressed.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, were you assigned to a particular person or particular group?
Mr. Hackworth: Did rotation. I was in the maintenance group. Did rotations for the various – anything from the barrier plant to K-27, K-25, K-29, maybe some of the buildings like in 1401, or the utilities end: Steam Plant, Water Plant, this sort of thing. That’s where I started was in the Steam Plant and Water Plant and the other utilities.
Mr. McDaniel: What kind of work would you do? What was typical for you?
Mr. Hackworth: Typical might be – you might have a pump failure. It could be within the intake or it could be in the sewage disposal end. It might be change a motor here or there, particularly within a cascade. They had a lot of what was called seals, change those compressors. Well, within the cascade, I’m saying K-25 and K-27, you had centrifugal force type pumps. And then when we built K-29, we went to axial flow type, which is a big improvement, more productive. And it was a – a lot of the work was basically the same except just with that type of rotating equipment.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, on the cascade, you had varying sizes of pumps and everything.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: I mean, you had little ones to really big ones, didn’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, that basically – I guess in the K-25 portion on the west side, which is of course torn down now, the – a lot of takeoff points, but various – you might range anywhere from a 7.5-horsepower motor to a 500 driving those pumps by size. So, yes, there was quite a variety.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, my understanding is let’s say you had to go in and do maintenance on a pump on a sale or something like that. They could set it up to bypass that, right? Still keep operational.
Mr. Hackworth: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Was that something you would work on to bypass, or they’d go ahead and do that and then call you guys in?
Mr. Hackworth: No, they would do that, Operations, Operators. They would do that.
Mr. McDaniel: Was the bypass a physical thing there, or was it something they could do in the control room?
Mr. Hackworth: They could do some of it in the control room. Some had to do manually, but most of the larger valves and things were motor operator driven. So it would be a long – some of those things had a long stem on them, but doing that by hand might have – it probably worn out three or four people, had to run those things out. Sometimes you’d have one stick, and usually in that case you couldn’t get it loose, then you’d have to remove the valve and put a new one in.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ve seen pictures of those valves with those long stems sticking up through the floor on the next floor above, and they’d go up and twist those things, you know.
Mr. Hackworth: Right. That’s why I say, some’s manual and some’s motor operated. Yeah, that’s quite a job even closing those.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure.
Mr. Hackworth: But if you went from there and on down into the pipe gallery, yeah there was an interesting aspect. And this is where most of your pipe – and you spoke of the long stems coming up to the operating floor. There was a – that was an operation. Sometimes we changed out – you had a method you could use by cutting out just the valve stem, the valve seats and the valve ballast. And most of those things had been welded in by Monel. So you had to use a torch of a type to – actually you were melting it and blowing off. And this area we’re talking about within the pipe gallery was – couldn’t stand up in most of it, so you leaned over all day trying to work, you know. And on top of that, you’ve got all of this rock wool insulation. And every time you’d take a
step, it would fly up. By the time you’d come out of there you’d look as red as a pickled beet.
Mr. McDaniel: And that was really cramped. That pipe gallery was really cramped, and I’m sure it was just difficult to work in.
Mr. Hackworth: It was difficult. Hot, noisy, difficult.
Mr. McDaniel: So you completed your training program after five years. Is that correct?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And then you just continued doing that kind of work?
Mr. Hackworth: I did. Continued doing that work until 1961 and had a layoff. I was laid off. I worked overseas for a period of time then.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, did you? Where’d you go?
Mr. Hackworth: Greenland. Ballistic missile early warning site.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. How did that job come about?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it so happens that one of my supervisor’s neighbors had gone up there – it’s at Thule, Greenland, which was an airbase – on a short-term project. They’d had I guess a small tsunami, so to speak, and because it had washed in and seawater got on some of the electrical apparatus in the switchyard. So they’d had to rebuild, and he was up there a short period of time and he’d told me about it. So I thought, well, maybe I ought to look into that. So I did. Sent an application in on – mailed on Sunday, and Tuesday I got a call wanting to know if I can come in the next day. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Now, were you married and had a family at this point?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. We had two children at that point, two small ones. The pay was extremely good. So it was several times what I was making here in Oak Ridge, so it was an opportunity to get ahead. And of course a lot of sacrifice on my wife’s part to do that, to keep things rolling here, and she did a great job of it. But we were able to – we’d just actually had built a new house. We’d lived in Oak Ridge, and we’d bought some property outside of Oak Ridge off of Laurel Road. And we’d finished building the house about two years ahead of that layoff, so we were able to pay that house off in eight years.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right, with that job that you had?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, so that was a good move.
Mr. McDaniel: How long were you there?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, there’s more to this story.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Tell me the more to it.
Mr. Hackworth: The more of the story, I was there off and on. I came back to the New York office where the company was located. It’s actually Burns & Rowe, which has done a lot of work here in Oak Ridge over the years and still have a presence. Stayed there at Thule, Greenland, with some vacation time in between, about three years. And they didn’t rebid the contract, so they had another project coming up. And this was during the time that Castro was cutting the water off to the base, Guantanamo. And the old admiral down there got tired of it, and he just cut it himself and started hauling in fresh water from Florida. So what basically happened there, I went down there. We started from scratch. They had an area that was an old seaplane base area and was able to utilize the concrete of that, cut an opening and come out of that with a building – actually a steam plant type there. Had three boilers there. And then what we had is evaporators. It took a lot of steam. But at the same time –
Mr. McDaniel: And where was this?
Mr. Hackworth: Guantanamo Bay.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, Guantanamo, okay.
Mr. Hackworth: So the bottom line was at the same time they had a lot of old generators on railcars that was from the ’30s. And there’s an interesting thing that I ran into there: you actually didn’t shut them down because of the need for the base and for the construction, but we learned to gauge what the oil level might be because there’s so many leaks. You had to have containers underneath catching it. And we set up a system where we was filtering the same oil and running it back through. So every hour or so, you’d have to add a couple more quarts. So it was unreal, but that was the conditions. It was rundown and way behind where they should have been as far as power for the base. So I stayed there about eleven months until we got in operation, and we all stayed about another fifteen months. And then came back home and worked a while in Atlanta. I worked a while in Chattanooga. In the meantime, I had put in a resume at X-10, so I got a call at X-10 and I worked over there about eight years.
Mr. McDaniel: So this would have been –
Mr. Hackworth: 1965.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, ’65. So you went to X-10 in ’65.
Mr. Hackworth: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s pause for just a second. I want to double-check something.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. So you went to work at X-10 in ’65.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. And what did you do out there?
Mr. Hackworth: I was what they call a millwright, still performing mechanical type work. And the first job was the HFIR project [High Flux Isotope Reactor], which I’m sure you’re quite familiar with.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: I stayed on that for a period of time, and then went to another project within the same area, Molten-Salt Reactor project [Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (1965-1969)], worked that for several years. And then there was going to be another layoff, so I transferred back to K-25.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. There you go. And how long did you stay at K-25?
Mr. Hackworth: Let’s see.
Mr. McDaniel: Till mid ’80s?
Mr. Hackworth: About twenty-one years, till ’94.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, till ’94. So you survived the big layoff at K-25 in the mid ’80s, didn’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. I’d been there, of course, all accumulated together, which you’re permitted to count your X-10 time, same company. So that added up.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I’m sure it did. So you said you retired in ’94. Were you retirement age at that point?
Mr. Hackworth: Sixty-two. They had some incentive and I retired.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, they do that quite often, don’t they? They just had one of those at Y-12, I think, last year, and I think they’re having one at the lab this year for folks to retire early and get a pile of money if they retire early.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it’s an incentive. And things were changing a lot as well. Quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of old-timers left when I left.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, I guess towards the end of your career at – well, let’s say the late ’80s and early ’90s at K-25, were they – they put K-25 in standby, I guess, in, what, ’85, ’86.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: But I guess the centrifuge program was still going at the time.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, it was.
Mr. McDaniel: So were you working on those projects?
Mr. Hackworth: I did work on both. I was actually in the centrifuge project. I had been in the cascade portion. I had been what they called a Shift Maintenance Coordinator, and that’s kind of like the guy that’s in charge of nights and weekends from the maintenance end for the whole site. At that period of time, I probably [had] about twenty-two supervisors and six hundred people. But later I went on up to the centrifuge, and then after I was up there a period of time, then they shut K-25 – well, K-31, K-33 and K-29, shut those down. And of course they was on standby still at that time. But when it went to a permanent shutdown, then I got designated to go back over and be over the shutdown. So I was over there for a period of time. So from there I went to the Shift Superintendent’s office. I was Shift Super there for several years.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that must have been – that must have felt pretty good personally to go from a trainee when you’re basically right out of high school, to having those kinds of responsibilities for that number of people.
Mr. Hackworth: It was. It was a good experience. The final project I worked on, was getting prepared for, was a Tiger Team. Have you heard about the Tiger Team?
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t think so. Tell me about that.
Mr. Hackworth: Maybe we can talk a little bit about it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: This was – in ’89, there had been a lot of, I guess, rumblings in the Department of Energy at that time saying that we need to determine if we really and truly have any environmental, health and safety, OSHA type other areas that we need to improve on. Well, this was – at the same time, about the time that Link Hall came to K-25. I don’t know whether you’ve heard the name or not. I don’t know how you missed him. He was a great, great – one of the best managers I’ve ever seen. He was a Site Manager. And he’d been with Lockheed-Martin for many years in Engineering and had served in a lot of different capacities over the years. Best organizer you could possibly want. So just a few days after he’d been there, he kind of sought me out and said, “Let’s take a ride around and let’s see what we’ve got.” So I showed him the good, the bad, and the indifferent. And he said, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it’s such a mess. We’re going to do something about it,” and did. So that’s when we knew from technical safety reviews and others that had been performed at other sites, we could pretty much predict what was coming. So we formed a team, and I was fortunate to be one of the four on that to prepare for this Tiger Team. Now, the Tiger Team visited thirty-two sites, DOE sites. They informed us there would be sixty-four coming. It turned out that seventy-six arrived. And we had made preparations to accommodate the sixty-four, so we had to hustle around and find the –
Mr. McDaniel: Now, who were the Tiger Team?
Mr. Hackworth: Okay. They were representing DOE; some DOE folks, some were contractors, some from other sites, just a variety of folks covering all aspects. I’m talking about reviews from the engineering standpoint. You know, are we doing things appropriate? Do we have the records we need? Are we following up with updated prints? All kinds of things.
Mr. McDaniel: But the main mission of the Tiger Team was to see about – was it to see kind of the overall operation, or was it just to make sure that environmentally?
Mr. Hackworth: No, it was overall.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. A complete review of the DOE sites basically.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. We had – I had been designated to put together a team to – what we called a sector team. And we broke the site down into eight sectors, inside and outside the fence, and we reviewed this thing and had it broken down to – had someone
from operations working with the person that I had. What we did was – actually hired some other contractors to come in, along with our environmental or health and safety, health physics, operations, the whole gamut. We looked in every building, probed in every corner. There was more than eleven hundred buildings and facilities and storage sheds and underground vaults that we looked at.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Hackworth: It was kind of interesting. We actually set up a team and reviewed each of these. We’d come up with some more – we’d come up with a lot of findings, and some we needed to correct immediately and did. We had a humongous amount of paperwork as a result of that. So when these Tiger Team folks were coming to – actually they were going to do the same thing or spot check at least what we had already done. So they did that, and they stayed six weeks. And that’s quite extensive.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it turned out that we were supposed to know something on Saturday, and this team had turned in the results to DOE headquarters and then sent word back it’s not possible. It can’t be that good.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really? [laughter]
Mr. Hackworth: We had a score in the nineties and most had been in the sixties and seventies.
Mr. McDaniel: How long did you have to prepare and for your team to do the work in preparation for the Tiger Team?
Mr. Hackworth: Roughly six months.
Mr. McDaniel: But it was still – that was a lot of work to do in six months, wasn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah. We had a long list and by priority of what each would be. Some of it would just be good business practices, on up to severe violations, a fineable violation if you don’t correct it. It was an interesting period of time, and we were able – I think we finally settled with an eighty-seven score, but DOE thought the other was too high. They didn’t believe it. So, well, you’re going to fire all the folks that come and did the surveys? But anyway, it was interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: So you said that was in ’89?
Mr. Hackworth: It started – actually it started in ’90.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, started in ’90. Okay.
Mr. Hackworth: But in ’89 DOE had begun to look at various things. And actually DOE had been ‘self-policing,’ would be the good word. And remember it’s the same time, all of the alphabet soup of these folks, new programs coming up and from an environmental end, lots of different things. You know, you ran into a situation like NEPA. There was actually nine different areas that we looked at in the environmental. Some of it could be from pesticides on up to major, major problems. So it was an interesting time. It took a team of folks to record these things. We had a weekly session set up that we would bring the folks in that owned it. You know, this is yours. And we had some selling to do on it. Some of them didn’t think they owned some things.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. [laughter]
Mr. Hackworth: So that got to be interesting sometimes.
Mr. McDaniel: They found out they did own it, didn’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: They did own it.
Mr. McDaniel: And they were responsible for it, weren’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: Exactly. Exactly.
Mr. McDaniel: Whether they liked it or not sometimes, I guess.
Mr. Hackworth: But the thing about Mr. Hall is he came up with money from DOE and other areas to correct the worst ones. Otherwise, it might be still sitting there today. I don’t know. But that was very interesting times.
Mr. McDaniel: How long was he there as a site manager?
Mr. Hackworth: He was there probably – I’m going to say three, four years maybe.
Mr. McDaniel: Long enough to get it cleaned up pretty decent.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, it was. He actually went from there to Hanford, Washington State. And I had retired by then and I got a call, wanted me to come out. So I went up there and spent several months doing the same thing, finding the problems.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, so he left here and went there and did the same thing, didn’t he?
Mr. Hackworth: He did. Lots of problems.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: Later on, I don’t know whether you heard the name Harold Connor mentioned or Bill Altman.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, those names sound familiar.
Mr. Hackworth: We were part of – us three and Mr. Hall. And later on had a little situation: a gentleman was going to retire out at Idaho Falls and sent Mr. Connor out there to fill in for him. So he no sooner got there than he gave me a call to come out to Idaho Falls. So I stayed out there about a year, and it happened to be the worst winter they had ever had, more snow or ice.
Mr. McDaniel: And a good winter out there is worse than we’ve ever experienced, isn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, when it’s daily and you got a pile of snow up the middle of the street, and then you come and haul it away overnight, so she had areas where they’d dump it. And huge piles of snow.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, it was interesting, I was interviewing a lady here a few months ago, and she was telling a story. And I don’t remember if it was – I think it was Montana. And she was talking about – she went to school, had about a hundred and twenty kids in the school. It was elementary school. It was fifty-six degrees below – the real temperature was fifty-six degrees below zero, and they had a hundred percent attendance at their school that day. And President Roosevelt called the school and congratulated them on that. So she kind of came from that same school. You don’t miss school or you don’t miss work. You go.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, you go regardless.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, exactly.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I kind of anticipated when you drive out from Idaho Falls, and it’s about forty miles before you see the first site there. And I began to see these markers along the roadway, and they’re like – maybe for like our mile markers, but they were like two-story mile markers, and that was to have some idea where the road was when the snow built up. So they had to contract with folks that actually would get the snow off the roadway during the night by the time the traffic started back in the morning.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you were out there for a year, where did you live? How far did you have to drive to go to work?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, forty miles was the closest.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mr. Hackworth: That was closest.
Mr. McDaniel: That was the closest? Oh, my.
Mr. Hackworth: It was about – it was over fifty miles to – you’d get on, see, left Idaho Falls till you got to the central location. But it was really huge. It was spread out.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet that was tough though.
Mr. Hackworth: Tough driving.
Mr. McDaniel: Tough driving. Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. They did have a bus system. It was kind of an interesting thing. It was kind of reminding what we talked about the Fox bus lines earlier. And this was run by the Lockheed, and they had a garage there that – it was a huge garage. And by that I’m saying they did everything there, not just mechanical, but the painting, bodywork, the chains, swap out, glass. Whatever there was to do on one, they did it. You’d be traveling along on this slick road about fifty-five miles an hour, and here’s these buses that are, shoom, they’re gone, just like there’s no snow there. But they had a dollar a day.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: A dollar a day, to and fro, which was a good deal.
Mr. McDaniel: That is a good deal. So you did that after you retired.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And you were out there for about a year?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And then you came back.
Mr. Hackworth: Came back here. By then, Mr. Connor had transferred down to South Carolina working for Westinghouse. So went down to Savannah Riverside and did some work down there, basically the same as doing these other locations. And we found some problems.
Mr. McDaniel: They just wouldn’t leave you alone, would they? Say, “I’m retired. Leave me alone.”
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it was interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. Do you have any good stories about K-25? I know one particular I want you to tell me about the guy that got lost.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah. Well, the gentleman is still living, so I’ll not use any names.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. But this was the big U. You were in the big U, is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: In K-33.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, at K-33. Okay. And it’s huge. I mean, it’s huge too.
Mr. Hackworth: It’s huge. It’s like, you know, six football fields inside, which is a lot of square footage. So I happened to have three or four different projects going over there, and I went over – drove over. And there was a sequence. If you really pay attention to it, you understand this stairwell number so-and-so and which side of the cell it would take you to. And if you didn’t know that, you’d have to walk all the way around looking for it. So this gentleman was in engineering, and he had been assigned to go over and take a look at a project that they were looking at as a possibility of starting up. Well, when I first went up the stairs to where I wanted to go, I had seen someone at a distance down there. You know, it’s far enough away, you can’t tell who’s who. I went ahead and took care of my business, and when I walked back out into the main alley, roadway on the cell floor, the second level, I saw him again down there. And he motioned to come to
me. So I motioned him to come that way. Hot and noisy, remember.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: So we met halfway there, and he said, “I hate to say this, but I’m lost. I can’t find my way out of here. Would you please help me?” He said, “I’ve been up here for two hours trying to find my way down here.” He said, “There’s no water. I couldn’t
find a restroom.” I said, “Well, you shouldn’t come up here by yourself until you learn a little bit about it.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. That might have made him go back to church, a little taste of the eternal fires, you know. [laughter]
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, that could have influenced him. But that was interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: But all those buildings were huge. I mean, just enormous buildings.
Mr. Hackworth: I think you’re aware that particularly in the early days, lots of bicycles, hundreds of them. And everybody had their own little markings on them. Hang them up.
Mr. McDaniel: Today they’d have golf carts, wouldn’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. They did. They had those before I left. I was involved in that up-rating, that cost over a billion dollars, ’75 through ’82. I was involved in that some for several years. That was another interesting project. But even though K-25 had been the most efficient as far as productivity in the SWUs [separative work units], it turns out that politics does play a part sometimes.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, absolutely.
Mr. Hackworth: And it came to play, so of course today Portsmouth is down, but Paducah is still running. Supposed to have already been shut down, but the centrifuge program is – a lot of folks have been working on it in recent years. But I guess I could say that right now it appears that DOE’s not sure of the financing that USCC is getting, or lack of. They had asked for additional money and it’s supposed to have been approved last fall, as I recall. Still hadn’t been resolved. So they’re still doing a lot of work, you know, here in Oak Ridge and at K-25. There’s a building down there where they’re running some machines. And the other facility I guess used to be Boeing?
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I think so.
Mr. Hackworth: And I guess that’s where I think are probably fabricating portions of machines over there. So there’s still people employed in Oak Ridge. There’s quite a few. But the intent is it will be – the main plant will be at Portsmouth, Ohio.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But it is interesting that story about shutting the centrifuge down early on because they didn’t think it was going to be as efficient, and now they’re discovering that – and all the research and development that was done in Oak Ridge is coming into play now as they’re thinking about redoing it in Portsmouth, I guess, rebuilding a centrifuge plant up there.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: My understanding was they had the buildings already built in Portsmouth for a long time.
Mr. Hackworth: Not all of them.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, they had some of them, some of the big buildings.
Mr. Hackworth: Two of the four.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, two of the four.
Mr. Hackworth: And they are huge buildings. I worked some projects up there for a period of time and in Paducah. This sector program I was telling you about was put in place in those as well and at Savannah River. That’s what I was doing down there.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, it’s kind of interesting. Let me ask you a question. Did you go to college?
Mr. Hackworth: Two years.
Mr. McDaniel: Two years, right. It’s interesting though that I’ve interviewed a lot of people who went to high school and went to college and got degrees in engineering or chemistry or things such as that and even got masters and things such as that. But you’re a – you’re just a fellow from the country who got his – went to college and started working and rose up through the ranks and made good, didn’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: I was well pleased. When I left, I thought it was kind of interesting prior to leaving, you know, some couple of years, it was I guess labor relations and getting into the payroll systems and the codes and so forth. And all of the sudden, Mr. Connor came by one day and said, “I’ve been trying to get you promoted, but they said they just don’t want to do it.” And I said, “Well, let’s go together. We’ll convince them.” And guess what?
Mr. McDaniel: What?
Mr. Hackworth: When we’d left there, I had already jumped two ranks where both required a college degree. But this wage and salary group then said, “Would you help us?” I thought that was kind of interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: There you go.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. You know a lot of these folks. You know the ones that deserve and don’t deserve, and I said I sure do. I’d be glad to help you.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s good.
Mr. Hackworth: So it turned out that that’s I guess one of the things that really helped me was rotating between different projects. And I asked to do that. A lot of times you get transferred here, here, here, but I wanted to get a good picture of the whole site and all of the activities going on. So I had that, and that’s what really gave me a big boost.
Mr. McDaniel: What – if you – looking back on your career and your life in this area, what are the things that really stand out to you? What are the things that you’re most proud of or the things that made the biggest impact, either positive or negative on your
life?
Mr. Hackworth: Okay. I’m ready to deal with the positive.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: One item, a very important item, you know, I made a pretty good salary. Not to start with now, mind you, $1.295 an hour. [Editor’s note: Rate of pay was calculated to three decimals.]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: That was in ’51 in that job. So I took a cut, about a $0.75 an hour cut to what I was doing to come to Oak Ridge, but I saw this as an opportunity. Working in Oak Ridge has given me an opportunity to make sure that our children, that they all had all the education they wanted. And I’m happy to say that I have one son that’s a Ph.D. The other son has a Master’s, a Bachelor’s and a Master’s. And our daughter went to East Tennessee State, and she’s a nurse. So she’s getting some practice in with me now.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I bet.
Mr. Hackworth: But they’re all – they all turned out real well. Very proud of all of them.
Mr. McDaniel: So your time at Oak Ridge, you were able to give your children what you wanted to give them.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. Yes. That’s very important. I enjoyed most of my work. I don’t mind telling you, some of it was really hard, tough. I’m talking about hard, hard work.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: A lot of people don’t particularly like to work in, say, like 115 degrees inside, day in and day out, and the noise. You know, I came away with good hearing. A lot of folks didn’t. One of the – I think if – look at all three sites overall, had there been a little better restriction or a little more – I guess I should say more emphasis on DOE and the companies to ensure that people had better respiratory protection. The
old days was production. I’m not saying – you know, I didn’t see anybody get killed or mangled. Some of the sites did have some fatalities, electrical. Had one guy at Paducah fell off of a housing and eventually died from that. And that’s – you never want to see that. So we were pretty lucky. My whole career, I didn’t have anyone that was severely hurt, and I’m proud of that.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good.
Mr. Hackworth: Gosh, people – safety was a big concern of mine, and if you can’t work safely, I don’t need you. You need to go find you another job. So, yeah, Oak Ridge, you know, you go back into the ’50s there and see, we lived in a one-bedroom flattop overlooking just out from the swimming pool. Used to be a hardware back in there, big hardware, and a daycare. In the morning you’d get up. You had these old coal stoves, and everybody in Oak Ridge had them. We’d fire them up, you know, six o’clock in the morning, whatever, and you’d look outside up and down the valley there, and nothing but black smoke.
Mr. McDaniel: Nothing but black smoke just hanging in those valleys.
Mr. Hackworth: That’s right, just hanging right up – and it’s like up and down the Turnpike. Today people would panic.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course they would.
Mr. Hackworth: But that was a way of life. They furnished the coal. I think we were paying, like, sixteen dollars a month house rent and the water was free.
Mr. McDaniel: Coal.
Mr. Hackworth: They’d furnish the coal in the little coal bin outside, come by once a week.
Mr. McDaniel: Fill it up for you, wouldn’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, and the black smoke would roll in.
Mr. McDaniel: They say that black smoke would get on those walls too, and they’d just come in and paint over it.
Mr. Hackworth: That’s right. That’s the way it happened.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, is there anything else you want to mention, anything else you want to talk about?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I would say this: even today when I first heard about we’re going to tear K-25 down, I said, gosh, you’re going to have a job. It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be easy as you might think. And guess what? It’s been pretty tough.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s been tough, hasn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. Spent a lot of money. They’ve got the worst part of it down, the west side. Used to call that ‘double R side.’
Mr. McDaniel: How come?
Mr. Hackworth: Extra restrictions, security.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really? Yeah. Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: Your higher assay was on that side. That’s where it came off.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: So that was an interesting thing. You had to have an escort, even though you had a Q clearance. You had to – you’d go in and you’d get an escort. You’d go out to do the work. The escort went with you, if there’s two people or there’s eight
people. If one had to go to the bathroom, everybody went because you couldn’t leave the escort.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Couldn’t leave the escort.
Mr. Hackworth: He couldn’t leave the people. So that was kind of interesting thing.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mr. Hackworth: But there was a lot of good times there. Made a lot of good friends. It was a good place to work.
Mr. McDaniel: You felt like it was a good career for you.
Mr. Hackworth: It was. I got a lot of breaks, but I worked at getting a better job.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. All right, well, thank you so much.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I appreciate you coming by today.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, sure, my pleasure.
Mr. Hackworth: And if I can help you in any way at any time, I’d be happy to.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that sounds great. It’s nice to be able to sit down and talk to you and have an opportunity for you to tell your story for future generations to be able to see.
Mr. Hackworth: Thank you.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Very good.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF JAMES HACKWORTH, SR.
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 17, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is June 17th, 2011, and I’m in the home of James M. Hackworth, Sr., on Dutch Valley Road. And I guess we’re in Clinton, aren’t we? Is this a Clinton address?
Mr. Hackworth: This is a Clinton mailing address, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Clinton mailing address, but it’s down out between Marlow and Clinton and the other side of Oak Ridge. So that’s where we are on Mr. Hackworth’s farm. So thanks for taking the time to talk with us. I appreciate it.
Mr. Hackworth: Glad to.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me about – let’s just start at the beginning. Where were you born and where were you raised? And tell me about your family and where you went to school.
Mr. Hackworth: Okay. I was born near Clinton on what would have been the old two-lane road. It goes around the Courthouse. Lived there maybe roughly a year or so after I was born. My parents then built a house – this was 1933. It’s next door to this house – and obtained about fifty acres from my grandfather. It turned out that I was still small, very small, in a crib, but one of the things I can remember them saying that the hammering and beating and so on, I didn’t wake up. Well, I still sleep very soundly.
But education wise, I went to Clinton High. I attended UT later at night school in Oak Ridge at the Oak Ridge High School at that time. In later years I had the opportunity to do some – I guess it’s called ‘distance learning’ today – from Lewis & Clark University in Godfrey, Illinois. Plus, I served an apprenticeship at K-25 for a maintenance mechanic. It was a five-year apprenticeship at that time. Today it’s three.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s stop for a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: All right. So we were talking about – now, did you have any brothers and sisters?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, I had two brothers and a sister, and two of the brothers worked in Oak Ridge. One at K-25 and one at Y-12, one for about thirty-five years and the other forty. And he didn’t miss a day of work and never late. I was a black sheep, I guess. I missed two days.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you really? Out of how many years?
Mr. Hackworth: Out of forty.
Mr. McDaniel: Out of forty years you missed two days of work.
Mr. Hackworth: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: Had pneumonia, walking pneumonia.
Mr. McDaniel: So anyway, you grew up here. I mean, where we are, right in this area. This was your home, I guess.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. Grew up in this area. After graduation from high school, one of my brothers and I went to Detroit and worked in an automobile factory up there about three years, two years for myself, three for him. And then when I was back in Oak Ridge, one of my friends had said that they would be interviewing, and I put in an application. Six weeks later, they called me to come to work.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mr. Hackworth: 1951.
Mr. McDaniel: You said you were born in ’33?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, ’31.
Mr. McDaniel: ’31. Okay, ’31. So you were ten or so when the war broke out, weren’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: That’s correct.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were old enough to remember some of that, weren’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yes. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you all spend very much time in Oak Ridge during that time during the war?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I guess in some ways we maybe were forced in it. My dad had been a letter carrier in Clinton for several years, and he had to retire because of – he had a twenty-five-mile walking route, and after seventeen years, he didn’t walk too good anymore.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess not.
Mr. Hackworth: So he got a job in Oak Ridge as the – it was Roane-Anderson at the time. And then he went from the MPs over to Oak Ridge Police Department, and I’m saying in the ’40s. It hadn’t formally become a city, of course. But he worked there several years, and he had some opportunities to get some passes for us. And we would go down, and like everybody else, the cafeteria is – you’d stand in line for three blocks before you got in the cafeteria, and that was pretty interesting. Of course, as a kid, I wasn’t interested in it, but you also saw the smokers standing in line. Somewhere along the line, the particular store would get out the word, “We’ve got cigarettes,” and here they would come from everywhere.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, they would come from everywhere. I bet. My goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: But that was during the time, rationing time, as well. And I guess some of the things that were rationed then, people today would say, “How could that be?” I am saying things such as sugar or meats or shoes. You only got so much gas per month. You had an A or a B sticker, and you had little rationing books for every child for all of the family. And that was kind of interesting. I still got, I think, my old rationing book.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, so your dad, he worked for Roane-Anderson, I guess, for the MPs there, right?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, right.
Mr. McDaniel: You lived out here in the country. Did you have a farm?
Mr. Hackworth: He did.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I meant. Did he farm part-time too?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, he did.
Mr. McDaniel: Did he have a garden?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, he had gardens, raising beef, and he sold some of the beef to individuals at the time. And people were very happy to get beef because you could only get small amounts at the grocery store. So it was part of the war effort. Mr. McDaniel: I guess that was kind of leading me to out here on the farm during that time when the people in the city were having shortages of things, you all were fairly self-sufficient.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: You grew food that you ate, most of it, I would imagine.
Mr. Hackworth: Right, we did. We would slaughter beef and pork, and we never went without some beef or pork. We always had food of that type to eat, raised a big garden.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you all do the slaughtering yourselves?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. That was quite an experience.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet it was. Do you remember the first time you witnessed it?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, I do. Just kind of an interesting sideline. We had a fellow that had moved here from Texas, and he was working in Oak Ridge. He was in this area. And he wanted to buy beef. My dad – they came to an agreement on a price, and he came down to get the beef one day. And he said, “Turn it out.” My dad was still at work. “Just turn it out, and I’ll take care of it.” Well, he took care of it but it took him about an hour and a half because when he shot the beef, he didn’t come anywhere near a kill.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, goodness gracious.
Mr. Hackworth: And it’s kind of turned out like one of those Western shoot-them-up things, you know. It wound up he didn’t have a lot of beef left.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, that was kind of idiotic. But there was a lot of incidences occurred. People would raise some of the things and actually take them to work and maybe even cook on the job.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, some of them did. And they would sell this then, you see.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, of course.
Mr. Hackworth: So some of them got caught and eliminated their jobs. I remember my dad talking about some folks who were doing that.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But people were willing to pay as much as they could for some of that stuff because they couldn’t get it.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, that’s right. One of the other interesting things that you’ve probably heard a lot about before was the bus system.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: The Fox brothers: R. C., who is still living today, lived down at Midway and Oliver Springs, and Gene were brothers, part of the Fox family today in the automobile business. And they started a bus. Had a contract with – then I guess it was AEC. And they ran buses all over: Chattanooga, Crossville, Oneida, Sevierville, Gatlinburg, Jellico, Chattanooga, just everywhere. It’s unreal. But they would come by and pick them up, and regardless of weather, it didn’t make any difference. It wasn’t like school closing. You went to work every day.
Mr. McDaniel: I interviewed Lester Fox, and he talked about that quite a bit.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, Lester’s involved in that. He’s a younger guy, you know.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, he was young.
Mr. Hackworth: But they’re – Lester, well, they’re a cousin of mine. There’s some good folks there.
Mr. McDaniel: So after high school, you said you and your brother went to Detroit for a little while, and then you came back to Oak Ridge and interviewed out at K-25. Got a job out there, did you say, in ’51?
Mr. Hackworth: 1951.
Mr. McDaniel: By then, K-25 was going pretty strong, wasn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, K-25 and K-27. K-29 had just been completed. K-31 was probably halfway completed.
Mr. McDaniel: What was your first job out there?
Mr. Hackworth: First job was what they called a Maintenance Mechanic Helper T. “T” was a trainee. So that was the five-year deal I was telling you about, before you got – you spent that amount of time, and progressively you would increase in your wages as you progressed.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, were you assigned to a particular person or particular group?
Mr. Hackworth: Did rotation. I was in the maintenance group. Did rotations for the various – anything from the barrier plant to K-27, K-25, K-29, maybe some of the buildings like in 1401, or the utilities end: Steam Plant, Water Plant, this sort of thing. That’s where I started was in the Steam Plant and Water Plant and the other utilities.
Mr. McDaniel: What kind of work would you do? What was typical for you?
Mr. Hackworth: Typical might be – you might have a pump failure. It could be within the intake or it could be in the sewage disposal end. It might be change a motor here or there, particularly within a cascade. They had a lot of what was called seals, change those compressors. Well, within the cascade, I’m saying K-25 and K-27, you had centrifugal force type pumps. And then when we built K-29, we went to axial flow type, which is a big improvement, more productive. And it was a – a lot of the work was basically the same except just with that type of rotating equipment.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, on the cascade, you had varying sizes of pumps and everything.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: I mean, you had little ones to really big ones, didn’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, that basically – I guess in the K-25 portion on the west side, which is of course torn down now, the – a lot of takeoff points, but various – you might range anywhere from a 7.5-horsepower motor to a 500 driving those pumps by size. So, yes, there was quite a variety.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, my understanding is let’s say you had to go in and do maintenance on a pump on a sale or something like that. They could set it up to bypass that, right? Still keep operational.
Mr. Hackworth: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Was that something you would work on to bypass, or they’d go ahead and do that and then call you guys in?
Mr. Hackworth: No, they would do that, Operations, Operators. They would do that.
Mr. McDaniel: Was the bypass a physical thing there, or was it something they could do in the control room?
Mr. Hackworth: They could do some of it in the control room. Some had to do manually, but most of the larger valves and things were motor operator driven. So it would be a long – some of those things had a long stem on them, but doing that by hand might have – it probably worn out three or four people, had to run those things out. Sometimes you’d have one stick, and usually in that case you couldn’t get it loose, then you’d have to remove the valve and put a new one in.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ve seen pictures of those valves with those long stems sticking up through the floor on the next floor above, and they’d go up and twist those things, you know.
Mr. Hackworth: Right. That’s why I say, some’s manual and some’s motor operated. Yeah, that’s quite a job even closing those.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure.
Mr. Hackworth: But if you went from there and on down into the pipe gallery, yeah there was an interesting aspect. And this is where most of your pipe – and you spoke of the long stems coming up to the operating floor. There was a – that was an operation. Sometimes we changed out – you had a method you could use by cutting out just the valve stem, the valve seats and the valve ballast. And most of those things had been welded in by Monel. So you had to use a torch of a type to – actually you were melting it and blowing off. And this area we’re talking about within the pipe gallery was – couldn’t stand up in most of it, so you leaned over all day trying to work, you know. And on top of that, you’ve got all of this rock wool insulation. And every time you’d take a
step, it would fly up. By the time you’d come out of there you’d look as red as a pickled beet.
Mr. McDaniel: And that was really cramped. That pipe gallery was really cramped, and I’m sure it was just difficult to work in.
Mr. Hackworth: It was difficult. Hot, noisy, difficult.
Mr. McDaniel: So you completed your training program after five years. Is that correct?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And then you just continued doing that kind of work?
Mr. Hackworth: I did. Continued doing that work until 1961 and had a layoff. I was laid off. I worked overseas for a period of time then.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, did you? Where’d you go?
Mr. Hackworth: Greenland. Ballistic missile early warning site.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. How did that job come about?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it so happens that one of my supervisor’s neighbors had gone up there – it’s at Thule, Greenland, which was an airbase – on a short-term project. They’d had I guess a small tsunami, so to speak, and because it had washed in and seawater got on some of the electrical apparatus in the switchyard. So they’d had to rebuild, and he was up there a short period of time and he’d told me about it. So I thought, well, maybe I ought to look into that. So I did. Sent an application in on – mailed on Sunday, and Tuesday I got a call wanting to know if I can come in the next day. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Now, were you married and had a family at this point?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. We had two children at that point, two small ones. The pay was extremely good. So it was several times what I was making here in Oak Ridge, so it was an opportunity to get ahead. And of course a lot of sacrifice on my wife’s part to do that, to keep things rolling here, and she did a great job of it. But we were able to – we’d just actually had built a new house. We’d lived in Oak Ridge, and we’d bought some property outside of Oak Ridge off of Laurel Road. And we’d finished building the house about two years ahead of that layoff, so we were able to pay that house off in eight years.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right, with that job that you had?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, so that was a good move.
Mr. McDaniel: How long were you there?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, there’s more to this story.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Tell me the more to it.
Mr. Hackworth: The more of the story, I was there off and on. I came back to the New York office where the company was located. It’s actually Burns & Rowe, which has done a lot of work here in Oak Ridge over the years and still have a presence. Stayed there at Thule, Greenland, with some vacation time in between, about three years. And they didn’t rebid the contract, so they had another project coming up. And this was during the time that Castro was cutting the water off to the base, Guantanamo. And the old admiral down there got tired of it, and he just cut it himself and started hauling in fresh water from Florida. So what basically happened there, I went down there. We started from scratch. They had an area that was an old seaplane base area and was able to utilize the concrete of that, cut an opening and come out of that with a building – actually a steam plant type there. Had three boilers there. And then what we had is evaporators. It took a lot of steam. But at the same time –
Mr. McDaniel: And where was this?
Mr. Hackworth: Guantanamo Bay.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, Guantanamo, okay.
Mr. Hackworth: So the bottom line was at the same time they had a lot of old generators on railcars that was from the ’30s. And there’s an interesting thing that I ran into there: you actually didn’t shut them down because of the need for the base and for the construction, but we learned to gauge what the oil level might be because there’s so many leaks. You had to have containers underneath catching it. And we set up a system where we was filtering the same oil and running it back through. So every hour or so, you’d have to add a couple more quarts. So it was unreal, but that was the conditions. It was rundown and way behind where they should have been as far as power for the base. So I stayed there about eleven months until we got in operation, and we all stayed about another fifteen months. And then came back home and worked a while in Atlanta. I worked a while in Chattanooga. In the meantime, I had put in a resume at X-10, so I got a call at X-10 and I worked over there about eight years.
Mr. McDaniel: So this would have been –
Mr. Hackworth: 1965.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, ’65. So you went to X-10 in ’65.
Mr. Hackworth: Mhm.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s pause for just a second. I want to double-check something.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. So you went to work at X-10 in ’65.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. And what did you do out there?
Mr. Hackworth: I was what they call a millwright, still performing mechanical type work. And the first job was the HFIR project [High Flux Isotope Reactor], which I’m sure you’re quite familiar with.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: I stayed on that for a period of time, and then went to another project within the same area, Molten-Salt Reactor project [Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (1965-1969)], worked that for several years. And then there was going to be another layoff, so I transferred back to K-25.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. There you go. And how long did you stay at K-25?
Mr. Hackworth: Let’s see.
Mr. McDaniel: Till mid ’80s?
Mr. Hackworth: About twenty-one years, till ’94.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, till ’94. So you survived the big layoff at K-25 in the mid ’80s, didn’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. I’d been there, of course, all accumulated together, which you’re permitted to count your X-10 time, same company. So that added up.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I’m sure it did. So you said you retired in ’94. Were you retirement age at that point?
Mr. Hackworth: Sixty-two. They had some incentive and I retired.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, they do that quite often, don’t they? They just had one of those at Y-12, I think, last year, and I think they’re having one at the lab this year for folks to retire early and get a pile of money if they retire early.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it’s an incentive. And things were changing a lot as well. Quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of old-timers left when I left.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, I guess towards the end of your career at – well, let’s say the late ’80s and early ’90s at K-25, were they – they put K-25 in standby, I guess, in, what, ’85, ’86.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: But I guess the centrifuge program was still going at the time.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes, it was.
Mr. McDaniel: So were you working on those projects?
Mr. Hackworth: I did work on both. I was actually in the centrifuge project. I had been in the cascade portion. I had been what they called a Shift Maintenance Coordinator, and that’s kind of like the guy that’s in charge of nights and weekends from the maintenance end for the whole site. At that period of time, I probably [had] about twenty-two supervisors and six hundred people. But later I went on up to the centrifuge, and then after I was up there a period of time, then they shut K-25 – well, K-31, K-33 and K-29, shut those down. And of course they was on standby still at that time. But when it went to a permanent shutdown, then I got designated to go back over and be over the shutdown. So I was over there for a period of time. So from there I went to the Shift Superintendent’s office. I was Shift Super there for several years.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that must have been – that must have felt pretty good personally to go from a trainee when you’re basically right out of high school, to having those kinds of responsibilities for that number of people.
Mr. Hackworth: It was. It was a good experience. The final project I worked on, was getting prepared for, was a Tiger Team. Have you heard about the Tiger Team?
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t think so. Tell me about that.
Mr. Hackworth: Maybe we can talk a little bit about it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: This was – in ’89, there had been a lot of, I guess, rumblings in the Department of Energy at that time saying that we need to determine if we really and truly have any environmental, health and safety, OSHA type other areas that we need to improve on. Well, this was – at the same time, about the time that Link Hall came to K-25. I don’t know whether you’ve heard the name or not. I don’t know how you missed him. He was a great, great – one of the best managers I’ve ever seen. He was a Site Manager. And he’d been with Lockheed-Martin for many years in Engineering and had served in a lot of different capacities over the years. Best organizer you could possibly want. So just a few days after he’d been there, he kind of sought me out and said, “Let’s take a ride around and let’s see what we’ve got.” So I showed him the good, the bad, and the indifferent. And he said, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it’s such a mess. We’re going to do something about it,” and did. So that’s when we knew from technical safety reviews and others that had been performed at other sites, we could pretty much predict what was coming. So we formed a team, and I was fortunate to be one of the four on that to prepare for this Tiger Team. Now, the Tiger Team visited thirty-two sites, DOE sites. They informed us there would be sixty-four coming. It turned out that seventy-six arrived. And we had made preparations to accommodate the sixty-four, so we had to hustle around and find the –
Mr. McDaniel: Now, who were the Tiger Team?
Mr. Hackworth: Okay. They were representing DOE; some DOE folks, some were contractors, some from other sites, just a variety of folks covering all aspects. I’m talking about reviews from the engineering standpoint. You know, are we doing things appropriate? Do we have the records we need? Are we following up with updated prints? All kinds of things.
Mr. McDaniel: But the main mission of the Tiger Team was to see about – was it to see kind of the overall operation, or was it just to make sure that environmentally?
Mr. Hackworth: No, it was overall.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. A complete review of the DOE sites basically.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. We had – I had been designated to put together a team to – what we called a sector team. And we broke the site down into eight sectors, inside and outside the fence, and we reviewed this thing and had it broken down to – had someone
from operations working with the person that I had. What we did was – actually hired some other contractors to come in, along with our environmental or health and safety, health physics, operations, the whole gamut. We looked in every building, probed in every corner. There was more than eleven hundred buildings and facilities and storage sheds and underground vaults that we looked at.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Hackworth: It was kind of interesting. We actually set up a team and reviewed each of these. We’d come up with some more – we’d come up with a lot of findings, and some we needed to correct immediately and did. We had a humongous amount of paperwork as a result of that. So when these Tiger Team folks were coming to – actually they were going to do the same thing or spot check at least what we had already done. So they did that, and they stayed six weeks. And that’s quite extensive.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it turned out that we were supposed to know something on Saturday, and this team had turned in the results to DOE headquarters and then sent word back it’s not possible. It can’t be that good.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really? [laughter]
Mr. Hackworth: We had a score in the nineties and most had been in the sixties and seventies.
Mr. McDaniel: How long did you have to prepare and for your team to do the work in preparation for the Tiger Team?
Mr. Hackworth: Roughly six months.
Mr. McDaniel: But it was still – that was a lot of work to do in six months, wasn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah. We had a long list and by priority of what each would be. Some of it would just be good business practices, on up to severe violations, a fineable violation if you don’t correct it. It was an interesting period of time, and we were able – I think we finally settled with an eighty-seven score, but DOE thought the other was too high. They didn’t believe it. So, well, you’re going to fire all the folks that come and did the surveys? But anyway, it was interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: So you said that was in ’89?
Mr. Hackworth: It started – actually it started in ’90.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, started in ’90. Okay.
Mr. Hackworth: But in ’89 DOE had begun to look at various things. And actually DOE had been ‘self-policing,’ would be the good word. And remember it’s the same time, all of the alphabet soup of these folks, new programs coming up and from an environmental end, lots of different things. You know, you ran into a situation like NEPA. There was actually nine different areas that we looked at in the environmental. Some of it could be from pesticides on up to major, major problems. So it was an interesting time. It took a team of folks to record these things. We had a weekly session set up that we would bring the folks in that owned it. You know, this is yours. And we had some selling to do on it. Some of them didn’t think they owned some things.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. [laughter]
Mr. Hackworth: So that got to be interesting sometimes.
Mr. McDaniel: They found out they did own it, didn’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: They did own it.
Mr. McDaniel: And they were responsible for it, weren’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: Exactly. Exactly.
Mr. McDaniel: Whether they liked it or not sometimes, I guess.
Mr. Hackworth: But the thing about Mr. Hall is he came up with money from DOE and other areas to correct the worst ones. Otherwise, it might be still sitting there today. I don’t know. But that was very interesting times.
Mr. McDaniel: How long was he there as a site manager?
Mr. Hackworth: He was there probably – I’m going to say three, four years maybe.
Mr. McDaniel: Long enough to get it cleaned up pretty decent.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, it was. He actually went from there to Hanford, Washington State. And I had retired by then and I got a call, wanted me to come out. So I went up there and spent several months doing the same thing, finding the problems.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, so he left here and went there and did the same thing, didn’t he?
Mr. Hackworth: He did. Lots of problems.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: Later on, I don’t know whether you heard the name Harold Connor mentioned or Bill Altman.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, those names sound familiar.
Mr. Hackworth: We were part of – us three and Mr. Hall. And later on had a little situation: a gentleman was going to retire out at Idaho Falls and sent Mr. Connor out there to fill in for him. So he no sooner got there than he gave me a call to come out to Idaho Falls. So I stayed out there about a year, and it happened to be the worst winter they had ever had, more snow or ice.
Mr. McDaniel: And a good winter out there is worse than we’ve ever experienced, isn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah, when it’s daily and you got a pile of snow up the middle of the street, and then you come and haul it away overnight, so she had areas where they’d dump it. And huge piles of snow.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, it was interesting, I was interviewing a lady here a few months ago, and she was telling a story. And I don’t remember if it was – I think it was Montana. And she was talking about – she went to school, had about a hundred and twenty kids in the school. It was elementary school. It was fifty-six degrees below – the real temperature was fifty-six degrees below zero, and they had a hundred percent attendance at their school that day. And President Roosevelt called the school and congratulated them on that. So she kind of came from that same school. You don’t miss school or you don’t miss work. You go.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, you go regardless.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, exactly.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I kind of anticipated when you drive out from Idaho Falls, and it’s about forty miles before you see the first site there. And I began to see these markers along the roadway, and they’re like – maybe for like our mile markers, but they were like two-story mile markers, and that was to have some idea where the road was when the snow built up. So they had to contract with folks that actually would get the snow off the roadway during the night by the time the traffic started back in the morning.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you were out there for a year, where did you live? How far did you have to drive to go to work?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, forty miles was the closest.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mr. Hackworth: That was closest.
Mr. McDaniel: That was the closest? Oh, my.
Mr. Hackworth: It was about – it was over fifty miles to – you’d get on, see, left Idaho Falls till you got to the central location. But it was really huge. It was spread out.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet that was tough though.
Mr. Hackworth: Tough driving.
Mr. McDaniel: Tough driving. Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. They did have a bus system. It was kind of an interesting thing. It was kind of reminding what we talked about the Fox bus lines earlier. And this was run by the Lockheed, and they had a garage there that – it was a huge garage. And by that I’m saying they did everything there, not just mechanical, but the painting, bodywork, the chains, swap out, glass. Whatever there was to do on one, they did it. You’d be traveling along on this slick road about fifty-five miles an hour, and here’s these buses that are, shoom, they’re gone, just like there’s no snow there. But they had a dollar a day.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: A dollar a day, to and fro, which was a good deal.
Mr. McDaniel: That is a good deal. So you did that after you retired.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And you were out there for about a year?
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And then you came back.
Mr. Hackworth: Came back here. By then, Mr. Connor had transferred down to South Carolina working for Westinghouse. So went down to Savannah Riverside and did some work down there, basically the same as doing these other locations. And we found some problems.
Mr. McDaniel: They just wouldn’t leave you alone, would they? Say, “I’m retired. Leave me alone.”
Mr. Hackworth: Well, it was interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. Do you have any good stories about K-25? I know one particular I want you to tell me about the guy that got lost.
Mr. Hackworth: Oh, yeah. Well, the gentleman is still living, so I’ll not use any names.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. But this was the big U. You were in the big U, is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: In K-33.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, at K-33. Okay. And it’s huge. I mean, it’s huge too.
Mr. Hackworth: It’s huge. It’s like, you know, six football fields inside, which is a lot of square footage. So I happened to have three or four different projects going over there, and I went over – drove over. And there was a sequence. If you really pay attention to it, you understand this stairwell number so-and-so and which side of the cell it would take you to. And if you didn’t know that, you’d have to walk all the way around looking for it. So this gentleman was in engineering, and he had been assigned to go over and take a look at a project that they were looking at as a possibility of starting up. Well, when I first went up the stairs to where I wanted to go, I had seen someone at a distance down there. You know, it’s far enough away, you can’t tell who’s who. I went ahead and took care of my business, and when I walked back out into the main alley, roadway on the cell floor, the second level, I saw him again down there. And he motioned to come to
me. So I motioned him to come that way. Hot and noisy, remember.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: So we met halfway there, and he said, “I hate to say this, but I’m lost. I can’t find my way out of here. Would you please help me?” He said, “I’ve been up here for two hours trying to find my way down here.” He said, “There’s no water. I couldn’t
find a restroom.” I said, “Well, you shouldn’t come up here by yourself until you learn a little bit about it.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. That might have made him go back to church, a little taste of the eternal fires, you know. [laughter]
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, that could have influenced him. But that was interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: But all those buildings were huge. I mean, just enormous buildings.
Mr. Hackworth: I think you’re aware that particularly in the early days, lots of bicycles, hundreds of them. And everybody had their own little markings on them. Hang them up.
Mr. McDaniel: Today they’d have golf carts, wouldn’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. They did. They had those before I left. I was involved in that up-rating, that cost over a billion dollars, ’75 through ’82. I was involved in that some for several years. That was another interesting project. But even though K-25 had been the most efficient as far as productivity in the SWUs [separative work units], it turns out that politics does play a part sometimes.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, absolutely.
Mr. Hackworth: And it came to play, so of course today Portsmouth is down, but Paducah is still running. Supposed to have already been shut down, but the centrifuge program is – a lot of folks have been working on it in recent years. But I guess I could say that right now it appears that DOE’s not sure of the financing that USCC is getting, or lack of. They had asked for additional money and it’s supposed to have been approved last fall, as I recall. Still hadn’t been resolved. So they’re still doing a lot of work, you know, here in Oak Ridge and at K-25. There’s a building down there where they’re running some machines. And the other facility I guess used to be Boeing?
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I think so.
Mr. Hackworth: And I guess that’s where I think are probably fabricating portions of machines over there. So there’s still people employed in Oak Ridge. There’s quite a few. But the intent is it will be – the main plant will be at Portsmouth, Ohio.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. But it is interesting that story about shutting the centrifuge down early on because they didn’t think it was going to be as efficient, and now they’re discovering that – and all the research and development that was done in Oak Ridge is coming into play now as they’re thinking about redoing it in Portsmouth, I guess, rebuilding a centrifuge plant up there.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: My understanding was they had the buildings already built in Portsmouth for a long time.
Mr. Hackworth: Not all of them.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, they had some of them, some of the big buildings.
Mr. Hackworth: Two of the four.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, two of the four.
Mr. Hackworth: And they are huge buildings. I worked some projects up there for a period of time and in Paducah. This sector program I was telling you about was put in place in those as well and at Savannah River. That’s what I was doing down there.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, it’s kind of interesting. Let me ask you a question. Did you go to college?
Mr. Hackworth: Two years.
Mr. McDaniel: Two years, right. It’s interesting though that I’ve interviewed a lot of people who went to high school and went to college and got degrees in engineering or chemistry or things such as that and even got masters and things such as that. But you’re a – you’re just a fellow from the country who got his – went to college and started working and rose up through the ranks and made good, didn’t you?
Mr. Hackworth: I was well pleased. When I left, I thought it was kind of interesting prior to leaving, you know, some couple of years, it was I guess labor relations and getting into the payroll systems and the codes and so forth. And all of the sudden, Mr. Connor came by one day and said, “I’ve been trying to get you promoted, but they said they just don’t want to do it.” And I said, “Well, let’s go together. We’ll convince them.” And guess what?
Mr. McDaniel: What?
Mr. Hackworth: When we’d left there, I had already jumped two ranks where both required a college degree. But this wage and salary group then said, “Would you help us?” I thought that was kind of interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: There you go.
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. You know a lot of these folks. You know the ones that deserve and don’t deserve, and I said I sure do. I’d be glad to help you.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s good.
Mr. Hackworth: So it turned out that that’s I guess one of the things that really helped me was rotating between different projects. And I asked to do that. A lot of times you get transferred here, here, here, but I wanted to get a good picture of the whole site and all of the activities going on. So I had that, and that’s what really gave me a big boost.
Mr. McDaniel: What – if you – looking back on your career and your life in this area, what are the things that really stand out to you? What are the things that you’re most proud of or the things that made the biggest impact, either positive or negative on your
life?
Mr. Hackworth: Okay. I’m ready to deal with the positive.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: One item, a very important item, you know, I made a pretty good salary. Not to start with now, mind you, $1.295 an hour. [Editor’s note: Rate of pay was calculated to three decimals.]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Hackworth: That was in ’51 in that job. So I took a cut, about a $0.75 an hour cut to what I was doing to come to Oak Ridge, but I saw this as an opportunity. Working in Oak Ridge has given me an opportunity to make sure that our children, that they all had all the education they wanted. And I’m happy to say that I have one son that’s a Ph.D. The other son has a Master’s, a Bachelor’s and a Master’s. And our daughter went to East Tennessee State, and she’s a nurse. So she’s getting some practice in with me now.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I bet.
Mr. Hackworth: But they’re all – they all turned out real well. Very proud of all of them.
Mr. McDaniel: So your time at Oak Ridge, you were able to give your children what you wanted to give them.
Mr. Hackworth: Yes. Yes. That’s very important. I enjoyed most of my work. I don’t mind telling you, some of it was really hard, tough. I’m talking about hard, hard work.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: A lot of people don’t particularly like to work in, say, like 115 degrees inside, day in and day out, and the noise. You know, I came away with good hearing. A lot of folks didn’t. One of the – I think if – look at all three sites overall, had there been a little better restriction or a little more – I guess I should say more emphasis on DOE and the companies to ensure that people had better respiratory protection. The
old days was production. I’m not saying – you know, I didn’t see anybody get killed or mangled. Some of the sites did have some fatalities, electrical. Had one guy at Paducah fell off of a housing and eventually died from that. And that’s – you never want to see that. So we were pretty lucky. My whole career, I didn’t have anyone that was severely hurt, and I’m proud of that.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good.
Mr. Hackworth: Gosh, people – safety was a big concern of mine, and if you can’t work safely, I don’t need you. You need to go find you another job. So, yeah, Oak Ridge, you know, you go back into the ’50s there and see, we lived in a one-bedroom flattop overlooking just out from the swimming pool. Used to be a hardware back in there, big hardware, and a daycare. In the morning you’d get up. You had these old coal stoves, and everybody in Oak Ridge had them. We’d fire them up, you know, six o’clock in the morning, whatever, and you’d look outside up and down the valley there, and nothing but black smoke.
Mr. McDaniel: Nothing but black smoke just hanging in those valleys.
Mr. Hackworth: That’s right, just hanging right up – and it’s like up and down the Turnpike. Today people would panic.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course they would.
Mr. Hackworth: But that was a way of life. They furnished the coal. I think we were paying, like, sixteen dollars a month house rent and the water was free.
Mr. McDaniel: Coal.
Mr. Hackworth: They’d furnish the coal in the little coal bin outside, come by once a week.
Mr. McDaniel: Fill it up for you, wouldn’t they?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah, and the black smoke would roll in.
Mr. McDaniel: They say that black smoke would get on those walls too, and they’d just come in and paint over it.
Mr. Hackworth: That’s right. That’s the way it happened.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, is there anything else you want to mention, anything else you want to talk about?
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I would say this: even today when I first heard about we’re going to tear K-25 down, I said, gosh, you’re going to have a job. It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be easy as you might think. And guess what? It’s been pretty tough.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s been tough, hasn’t it?
Mr. Hackworth: Yeah. Spent a lot of money. They’ve got the worst part of it down, the west side. Used to call that ‘double R side.’
Mr. McDaniel: How come?
Mr. Hackworth: Extra restrictions, security.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really? Yeah. Sure.
Mr. Hackworth: Your higher assay was on that side. That’s where it came off.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Hackworth: So that was an interesting thing. You had to have an escort, even though you had a Q clearance. You had to – you’d go in and you’d get an escort. You’d go out to do the work. The escort went with you, if there’s two people or there’s eight
people. If one had to go to the bathroom, everybody went because you couldn’t leave the escort.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Couldn’t leave the escort.
Mr. Hackworth: He couldn’t leave the people. So that was kind of interesting thing.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mr. Hackworth: But there was a lot of good times there. Made a lot of good friends. It was a good place to work.
Mr. McDaniel: You felt like it was a good career for you.
Mr. Hackworth: It was. I got a lot of breaks, but I worked at getting a better job.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. All right, well, thank you so much.
Mr. Hackworth: Well, I appreciate you coming by today.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, sure, my pleasure.
Mr. Hackworth: And if I can help you in any way at any time, I’d be happy to.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that sounds great. It’s nice to be able to sit down and talk to you and have an opportunity for you to tell your story for future generations to be able to see.
Mr. Hackworth: Thank you.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Very good.
[end of recording]